Emotional Eating, Binge Eating Disorder and Negative Body Image

Eating Disorders and Disordered Eating is not about the food

Effective Eating Disorder Treatment leads to intuitive eating, healthy eating, and balanced eating. This requires a strong and healthy connection to Self.

Do you see yourself below?

Emotional Eating is comforting yourself with food. This usually takes the form of carbohydrates. In addition, you might numb yourself with food rather than tolerate unpleasant feelings. Finally, entertaining, celebrating or “treating yourself” with food might also be signs that you’re an Emotional Eater.

Binge Eating is eating large amounts of food and feeling out of control. If you eat compulsively, or secretly, these are also indications that your relationship with food is out of balance. Eating when not hungry, eating rapidly, and eating to physical discomfort are all behaviors associated with Binge Eating Disorder. Especially relevant are feelings of shame or guilt that follow a food binge. Often, women with Binge Eating Disorder will compensate by restricting. Restricting, in turn, increases the urge to Binge by triggering the body’s need to compensate for deprivation.

Bulimia is a category of behaviors designed to facilitate the expulsion of food or calories from the body. These behaviors often include self-induced vomiting, laxative abuse, diuretic abuse and over-exercising. The goal of these behaviors is to avoid or mitigate weight gain, to facilitate weight loss and/or to experience the physical release often associated with purging. Often, women struggling with Binge Eating Disorders will attempt to compensate for bingeing with one or more bulimic behaviors.

Negative Body Image is driven by the belief that there are preferred and non-preferred body types and certain ways your body should look vs. how your body actually looks.  An overly fixated focus on your body, your weight, your physical shape and how it compares to the body of others are all typical manifestations of Negative Body Image.

Transient ‘fashion’ and ‘marketeers-for-profit’ typically create and sell the idea that certain body types and physical characteristics are fashionable and others ‘not,’ from one year to the next. Women are left navigating ever-changing minefields of conformity and rejection, all in an effort to maximize insecurity and sell, sell, sell.  Body Positivity and Diversity and Inclusion campaigns – Health at Every Size, for example – threaten the very existence and success of ‘marketeers,’ and their efforts to sell us “Hope In a Jar” (or a pair or life-changing yoga pants) in order to achieve an acceptable place in the world.

Just say “No” to being manipulated, and…Just say “Yes” to being your imperfect perfect Self.

Binge Eating Disorder Treatment

I provide online therapy for Disordered Eating, Binge Eating Disorder and Negative Body Image Issues with the same effective approaches that I integrate into all of my therapy practice. Because Eating Disorders and Body Image struggles are symptoms of other issues, it is imperative to address and resolve the underlying distress before it is possible to experience relief. Disordered eating behaviors are maladaptive coping mechanisms. In order to eliminate the need for the maladaptive coping mechanism, the underlying issues must be resolved, and new healthier coping skills learned in their place.

Bariatric Surgery Patients

The outcome of bariatric surgery can be significant — from rapid shifts in physical disease to enormous psychological changes.

However, your health and stabilization after bariatric surgery requires implementing a “new normal” and making big lifestyle changes. The most important of these changes is developing a healthy, long-term relationship with food, eating, your body, and your Self.

Because you want to achieve and maintain healthy body weight and function over the long term, it’s ideal to begin working on your relationship with food, body and weight well before your bariatric surgery. The goal of therapy is to identify and resolve the emotional and psychological issues that contribute to your Disordered Eating. In some cases, clients will lose sufficient weight with therapy alone, and decided against surgery. In other cases, clients will reduce or eliminate their emotional dependence on food which will ensure the long-term results of bariatric surgery and avoid the weight re-gain experienced by over 40% of surgical patients.

Wherever you are in your weight management journey – gathering information, contemplating your decision, pre-surgery, or post-surgery – I look forward to helping you love and appreciate the body and skin your are in.

Read my GA Voice Interview from June 2020.